It is a mistake to conceive of solitude as necessarily directed inwardly, since a common joy of solitude is immersion in the (outer) natural world. Thoreau’s experience as he walked by the pond in the evening seems not to have been either “inward” or self-considering. It is also unwise to think of solitude as necessarily focused on the self, because one of the celebrated virtues of solitude has been its propitiousness for transcendence of self. Philip Koch